Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in The War on Terror

Mohammad Reza Shah
Pahlavi (1919-80) was the Shah of Iran from 1941-1979. He was born in
Tehran and sent to school in Switzerland as a child. He completed his education at a Tehran
military school. He was married three
times, the first time to Dilawar Princess Fawzia,
a daughter of Faroq I, king of Egypt.

In 1941, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi ascended to the throne
after his father, Reza Shah, was forced to abdicate by Great Britain and Russia,
who feared that the elder Shah was too close to the Germans. Pahlavi proved a reliable ally during the war
and continued his pro-western policies after the end of the war. He was temporarily driven from power in 1953
by reformers led by the prime minster, Mohammed Mosaddeq. But he was restored to
power in a coup orchestrated by British and American intelligence
agencies.

As Shah, Mohammad Reza pursued a program of
modernization. He granted women the
right to vote and he mounted a literacy campaign. But, according to his critics, he spent too much
on defense and he built an internal security force (SAVAK) that brutally
crushed his political opponents.

In 1979, he was driven from power by Islamic fudamentalists
led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. These Shiite
Muslims believed that the Shah’s reforms threatened traditional religious
values. Moderates, disgusted by the Shah’s
opulent lifestyle and the brutality of SAVAK, also joined in ousting the
Shah.

Dying of cancer, he was granted temporary medical asylum in
the United States before moving to Egypt where he died in 1979.